How conservatives are conspiring to disenfranchise millions of Americans

HERE‘s a long and detailed piece from the Center For American Progress on voter-suppression efforts of the political right:

The right to vote is under attack all across our country. Conservative legislators are introducing and passing legislation that creates new barriers for those registering to vote, shortens the early voting period, imposes new requirements for already-registered voters, and rigs the Electoral College in select states. Conservatives fabricate reasons to enact these laws—voter fraud is exceedingly rare—in their efforts to disenfranchise as many potential voters among certain groups, such as college students, low-income voters, and minorities, as possible. Rather than modernizing our democracy to ensure that all citizens have access to the ballot box, these laws hinder voting rights in a manner not seen since the era of Jim Crow laws enacted in the South to disenfranchise blacks after Reconstruction in the late 1800s.

Talk about turning back the clock! At its best, America has utilized the federal legislative process to augment voting rights. Constitutional amendments such as the 12th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, and 26th have steadily improved the system by which our elections take place while expanding the pool of Americans eligible to participate. Yet in 2011, more than 30 state legislatures considered legislation to make it harder for citizens to vote, with over a dozen of those states succeeding in passing these bills. Anti-voting legislation appears to be continuing unabated so far in 2012.

7 Comments

I voted on Tuesday in the primary and simply walked up to the table and said my last name. They then flipped to a list and asked me to confirm my address. I could read it right off the sheet of paper 1 foot away from me. Then I voted.

How do you know that voter fraud is exceedingly rare if we are checking the ID of people who vote?

The politics in this country are very polarized. We have a recent history of VERY close elections, and it is easy to acquire and show ID and it is required many other places in our lives.

To call this anti voting legislation is ridiculous. If people are interested in voting, they will in fact register and vote. These laws are in fact pro-voting legislation making sure we each get 1 vote and that it counts.

In the CCES, respondents answered questions about
whether they were asked to show identiﬁcation and if they
were prevented from voting because of a problem with identiﬁcation. Ansolabehere (2007) used this data to demonstrate
that exclusions from voting are exceptionally rare. Twentytwo respondents out of the 36,421 person sample said voter-ID
requirements prevented them from voting. Ansolabehere
reports no more than 0.2% of potential voters claimed to have
been excluded from voting due to ID requirements, and with
no clear demographic pattern among them, there is very little
empirical basis to raise the alarm over the implementation of
identiﬁcation requirements.
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As Ansolabehere explains, “one
would need a survey more than 10 times as large as this one to
begin to gauge who was excluded and why. It is just that rare
of a phenomenon” (2007, 8). Indeed, when non-voters in the
Current Population Surveys (CPS) from 2000 to 2006 were
asked why they did not vote, a lack of interest in politics was
given as a reason twice as often as registration problems (which
include a variety of issues, many of which are unrelated to
having a photo ID at the polls on Election Day). Indeed, according to the CPS, even in states where photo IDs are required,
11.7% of non-voters claim that a lack of interest kept them
home in 2006 while 6.3% cited general registration problems.
General registration problems could include voters turned
away due to a lack of identiﬁcation but also includes voters
who had moved without reregistering, felons, and a litany of
other special cases. More telling was that one-third of 2006PS respondents from Indiana said they did not vote because
they were “too busy,” which can arguably be interpreted to
mean they were less interested in midterm voting; after all
they did respond to the CPS.
At every level of analysis, and with multiple forms of data,
we have consistently demonstrated that voter-identiﬁcation
laws appear to be a much smaller piece to the voting behavior
puzzle than are factors such as the kinds of issues on a state
ballot, the competitiveness of campaigns, the institutional
structures of a particular election, socioeconomic factors, and
individual-level motivational factors such as interest in politics. This is not to say that the rules of voting are unimportant
or that there is no potential for disenfranchisement; rather
our ﬁndings suggest that voter-ID laws have had no systematic eﬀect on turnout thus far, and that some rules (voter-ID
laws) do not aﬀect turnout as much as others (same-day registration in Minnesota, a state with historically high turnout).
While voter-ID laws appear to have little to no main eﬀects
on turnout (see Alvarez, Bailey, and Katz 2007), our central
argument is that other individual-level motivations such as
interest in politics (Berinsky 2005), types of elections (Gronke,
Galenas-Rosenbaum, and Miller 2007), and social issues (Tolbert, Grummel, and Smith 2001) would mediate any impacts
related to ID rules. While strict ID requirements have the
potential to burden some members of the electorate, our analyses suggest that these numbers are small. What’s more, actions
taken by state governments, interest groups, and political parties are likely strong enough to induce those who are interested in voting, but have no more strict form of ID, to take
action to ensure their voice is heard. This form of political
resilience is the type we expect, and have seen from racial
minorities, women, and other oppressed groups in America’s
history.
Until there is systematic, empirical evidence of discrimination in the administration or availability of required forms
of identiﬁcation, there is little reason to suspect voteridentiﬁcation laws will signiﬁcantly aﬀect turnout. Thus, we
fail to reject the null hypothesis that voter-ID laws do not
signiﬁcantly aﬀect turnout. While all state-level voting laws
should be heavily scrutinized as eﬀorts to stop voter disenfranchisement are paramount, it is time we give some
credit to the electorate and as Berinsky (2005) suggests, spend
more time searching for ways to increase citizens’ interest in
politics.

I’ve posted this question on other posts dealing with voter fraud. Where is the massive evidence of huge voter fraud? When I vote in Winn. County, I walk up and give my name, THEN I HAVE TO SIGN THE FORM and the signature HAS TO MATCH the signature they have on file when I orginally registered. If I were to try to go to a different ward and vote again, then wouldn’t have my name. If I tried to use someone else’s name, I wouldn’t be able to match the signature. So, again, any huge examples of massive voter fraud out there? The last time I asked, someone linked to a story from 1994 and then some issue in NYC earlier this year that was hardly significant. Repubs are clearly trying to suppress under the guise of solving a problem that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

expdoc: Speaking of voting, I see that the incompetent Republican county clerk in Waukesha screwed up the vote count again the other night. And I see that the Milwaukee paper is calling for her to step down.